Job hunting: What's the forecast?

More than any other crises, the only one people truly care about is whether or not they have a job. Everything else looks tolerable when you have steady income coming in and shoring up your bank account. With the plethora of job websites up, there are a lot of resumes that can be scanned and there are apparently a number of jobs available as well. These jobs ofcourse don’t fit every experience profile but that’s where head-hunters are expected to do their matchmaking – fixing up the right people to the correct jobs on offer.

Naukri.com has been coming out with a monthly report of what’s on offer with regard to jobs, salary and increment expectations, which sectors are hot and which are not etc. The report is a nice glimpse at what’s going on in the jobs scenario, especially when the hearsay is that recruitment is stagnating or the jobs on offer are not quite in keeping with a person’s experience or expectations.

The former may be a myth but the latter is true. I’ve personally got offers from just about anyone and everyone who wants to do something or anything with writing and editing. There is no saying how long those firms have been around and how long are they likely to last, if you went to work for them. So, I’ve not been tempted to apply for most of those job-alerts I keep receiving from the website. There may be many like me out there – eminently employable but just not eager to grab drab offers.

May be that is the reason why the naukri.com report JobSpeak states that: “Hiring activity dipped across all experience bands in December ’09 owing to the end-of-year holiday season, with the maximum decline of 6.7% in the 4 to 7 years experience buckets.”



Graphic source: Naukri.com JobSpeak Report

As the pie chart (from the JobSpeak report) shows, the number of people who fall in the 4-7 years job experience category is the largest at 36% followed by 31% who are in the 0-3 years category of experience and 22% who fall somewhere between these two – in the 8-12 years experience category.

Here are some other points to ponder from the Naukri Hiring Outlook Survey 2010 that the site has e-mailed with their routine report. Since this is going to be subjective and the nature of the questions require people to ‘project’ a picture, let’s hope that in actuality, things develop along these lines.

Recruiters say that:
- 72.3% of recruiters say that new jobs will be created.
- 24.2% say that replacement hiring will continue.
- 1.2% believe that layoff will happen.
- 2.3% of the population believe that no jobs will be created.

There’s a slight goof up with this one in the report. I’ve corrected it here. Most hiring to take place in the 1-3 years experience bands. So, this is not good news for people with more experience who don't want to do BPO kind of jobs.
- Fresher's- 9%
- 1-3 years- 42.1%
- 4-8 years- 40%
- Above 8 years- 9%

Recruiters say that:
- 43.6% say increments will range between 5% to 10%
- 40.7% recruiters expect it to range between 10% to 20%
- 8.9% expect above 20% increments
- Only 6.7% expect it to be less than 5%

There’s more easy-to-understand information in this 10 page survey report. Read it here: http://w10.naukri.com/mailers/recruiter/Hiring_Surve/Hiring_Outlook_Survey_jan10.pdf?othersrcp=10385&wExp=N